BLP - no policies for changing access rights or
creation and deletion of subjects and objects
HRU addresses these issues
Not an alternative to BLP, it
captures a different set of Policies
HRU defines six primitive operations for manipulating
subjects, objects and the access matrix
enter access right into Matrix
delete access right from Matrix
create subject s
delete subject s
create object o
delete object o
Using these primitive operations, you can
build up more complex commands to allow a
variety of functions to be carried out
Access rights
Read, Write, Own
Owners can manipulate their objects
access matrix describes the state of the system
commands effect changes in the access
HRU can model policies for
allocating access rights
Leakage and Safety
Leakage
An access matrix M is said to leak the right a if there
exists a command c that adds a into a position of the
access matrix that previously did not contain a.
Safety
An access matrix M is said to be safe with
respect to the right a if no sequence of commands
can transform M into a state that leaks a.
Difficult to decide if the model is safe
This introduces the concept of Decidability
A problem is called undecidable if there is no
algorithm that can guarantee to provide a
solution to every instance of the problem
No algorithm can possibly exist to
solve every instance of the problem
Decidability relates to every
instance of the problem.
The more expressive the security model,
the more difficult it is to verify security
Linked to the 3rd Fundamental design
decision - Complexity or Assurance
the Concepts of 'leakage' and 'safety'
are specifically concerned with
whether existing rights can be used to
add unsafe access rights to the matrix
To verify compliance
with policy
check that no undesirable
access rights can be granted